From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; rv:1.7.3)
Gecko/20040930 Firefox/0.10
Description of problem:
About every 5-25 minutes ALSA "pauses" the audio for a couple seconds
(which can be really annoying if you are presenting a video). The
weird thing is the way the audio pauses, whatever program is playing
the program will continue playing uninterrupted but nothing comes out.
There are also no error messages generated in any of the log files
(dmesg, messages, secure). I don't believe this is a hardware problem
because it is too consistent (and I haven't messed with anything
between when it worked and when it didn't) and it appeared to start
after the most recent update to alsa-libs a little while back.
Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
alsa-lib-1.0.6-1
How reproducible:
Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Update everything
2. Run an audio program (XMMS, CD Player, MPlayer, Xine, or otherwise)
3. Set the audio program to use ALSA or OSS emulation, it doesn't matter
4. Play audio while you work on things or browse the web (or you just
play the audio program and don't touch anything else)
Actual Results: Audio "pauses" every few minutes for about two seconds.
Expected Results: The audio shouldn't have paused.
Additional info:
System:
Sound Blaster Live! Platinum (EMU10K1 chipset)
ASUS SK8N
AMD FX-53
Corsair PC-2700 RAM
GeForce 6800 w/ nvidia driver
WD740GD SATA Drive

Seeing something very similar, but my kit is very different.
I assumed this was a kernel problem, not alsa-lib.
Epia-M 1GHz
Linux version 2.6.10-1.1056_FC4
(bhcompile@decompose.build.redhat.com) (gcc version 3.4.3 20041226
(Red Hat 3.4.3-11)) #1 Thu Dec 30 23:48:33 EST 2004
Using ALSA, but on a snd_via82xx module
Via built-in shared-memory video
Again the problem is seen on video playback, a pause of two seconds
or so at fairly long intervals, many minutes. It is sort of like
mplayer is on a nice 19 (it isn't) and something important is
happening. The CPU is not maxed out at these times and it should be
able to easily do both with no dropouts.